Tag Archives: Facebook

Adding a public Google Calendar is a great way to present activities in an easily shared fashion.

To add a Google Calendar to your Facebook Page, you will first need a Facebook Page (not a personal profile page) and a Google (Gmail) account.

Create the Google Calendar

Make a public calendar. This can be an existing calendar or one created for this purpose.

Make the Calendar Public

After the calendar has been created, click on the drop-down arrow beside the calendar name and choose Calendar Settings. The Calendar Details page will open.

Click the Share this Calendar link.

Making a Google Calendar Public

Enable the Make this calendar public checkbox.

Click the Save button.

The calendar view will be displayed.

Customize the Calendar HTML Code

Return to the calendar’s details page.

Click on the drop-down arrow beside the calendar name and choose Calendar Settings. The Calendar Details page will open:

Locate the Embed this Calendar section

Scroll down the page and find the Embed This Calendar section.

Click on the Customize the color, size, and other options link.
A new window or tab will open, the Google Embeddable Calendar Helper:

Google Embeddable Calendar Helper

A preview of your calendar is visible. You can change the title, default view and other elements of the calendar. The view will update to show you what your calendar will look like when the changes are applied. If you do make changes, be sure to press the UPDATE HTML button to ensure those changes are reflected in the HTML.

Be prepared to copy and paste the HTML code. However, do not do so yet.

You will be routed to the Set Up Tab view. Click the Set Up Tab button.

Follow the instructions in the index.html area

Copy the HTML code that you customized previously for your Google calendar into the index.html area.
Replace the instructions with your code (or the instructions will appear along with your calendar).

The Static HTML window. Paste your calendar code here.

Click the Save & Publish button.

Name the Tab

From your Facebook Page, select Settings.

Return to Settings to Name the Tab

Click on the Apps category on the left.

Apps that have been added will be listed on the right.

From the Static HTML: iframe tabs app section, click on the Edit Settingslink.

The Edit Static HTML: iframe tabs Settings dialog box will appear:

The Edit Static HTML: iframe tabs Settings dialog box

Enter the name of your calendar in the Custom Tab Name: text box.

Click the Save button.

Click the OK button.

You can also add an image that will appear beside the link on the right hand side of your page.

Additional Ideas

Now the App code has been connected to your Facebook page, additional tabs can be added. Any piece of embeddable HTML code can be used. For example; on-line catalog search code. To add additional tabs, return to the page Settings and select Apps.

Click the Go to App link for the Static HTML: iframe tabs app.

The app will walk you through creating an additional tab.

Woobox has an app called Tweet Feed for Pages, which will embed your Twitter feed into a tab on your page. The concept is similar to embedding a Google Calendar. Woobox’s app will walk you through the process of adding the tab.

I’m a big fan of Excel’s conditional formatting feature. I use it a lot in my spreadsheets to check on the quality of data, find errors and many other tasks. Here is the first of a couple of examples of how I’m using conditional formatting in my social media spreadsheet.

Just a bit of background on the spreadsheet. I use this spreadsheet to compose Facebook Posts and Tweets for the Redcliff Library. I also use it to schedule when the posts/tweets will be published. This allows me to sit down and plan a coherent sequence of posts/tweets.

I often take the Facebook posts and cut them down to shorter lengths and reuse them on Twitter. Twitter has a character limit of 140 characters. However, I don’t want to use all 140 characters if I can avoid it. Its’ generally recognized that the ideal tweet length is around 120 characters. This length allows others to retweet and add hashtags without having to edit the tweet.

So I have created 4 conditional formatting rules to help me meet this length limit.

The background of the cell turns bright red [STOP] if the tweet is over 140 characters.

The background of the cell turns dull red if the tweet is over 135 characters.

The background of the cell turns bright orange [WARNING] if the tweet is over 125 characters.

The background of the cell turns dull orange if the tweet is over 120 characters.

Why four rules? I could use 2 warnings only; at 120 and 140 characters respectively. In fact, that is where I started. But, writing tweets can be a tricky thing and I found I needed a little wiggle room to help me when I compose. The other thing to keep in mind is that the conditional format isn’t applied until I finish editing the cell (by pressing the Enter key or the checkmark). It is possible to have an interactive format applied using VBA, but those functions are memory intensive and slow down the whole spreadsheet. Since my writing process seems to involve a lot of pauses to think, stopping to apply the conditional format isn’t really a big problem for me.

So what does it look like in action?

Conditional Formatting Results

As a result, I can quickly identify which tweets need to be edited. Here are the 4 rules as displayed in the Conditional Formatting Dialog box.

These are formula based conditional formats.

The formula the conditional format is based on.

A conditional formatting formula must return a value of TRUE in order to fire. The following formula uses the AND, SEARCH and LEN functions

=AND(((SEARCH(“TW”,B1))>0),LEN(H1)>140)

If you were reading this formula in something like english it would read: “If the letters TW appear in column B AND the length of text in this cell is more that 140 charactersthe result equals TRUE”.

Why am I testing for the presence of TW in the subject column? Remember I said that I had both Facebook and Twitter posts in the same spreadsheet. I don’t want the conditional formatting to flag Facebook posts, which by their nature are longer.

Pro Tip:

When you are writing a formula for conditional formatting, do it in a cell in the spreadsheet first. The dialog for conditional formatting is really cramped and you don’t get any help features. After you are sure the formula works, you can then copy/paste it into the dialog using the Ctrl + Vkeyboard shortcut. Also, because I planned on apply this conditional format to the entire Description column ($H:$H). I had cell H1 selected when I built the conditional formula. That way the formula will adjust relatively to the entire column. Using absolute and relative references properly is another tricky part of building conditional formatting formulas.

applying the coloured background fill

Once I have my formula built. I can click the format button and select the background colour fill.

When I’ve built my first format successfully I can then use it for the basis of the subsequent formulas. Just changing the length of the text in the cell.

=AND(((SEARCH(“TW”,B1))>0),LEN(H1)>140)

=AND(((SEARCH(“TW”,B1))>0),LEN(H1)>135)

=AND(((SEARCH(“TW”,B1))>0),LEN(H1)>125)

=AND(((SEARCH(“TW”,B1))>0),LEN(H1)>120)

The order of the rules and the stop if true flags must be set.

To make this really successful, the rules need to be placed in the proper order, with the Stop If True flags turned on. Now excel will check to see if the text exceeds 140 characters first, then 135, then 125 and finally 120. The Stop if Trueflag doesn’t need to be set on the final rule, because no other rules follow it.

Conditional formats can take time to build, but are extremely useful in many ways.

To find another example of using conditional formatting with a social media spreadsheet check out this post.

5 Things I Learned On My Summer Vacation

I volunteer as a Board Member for the Redcliff Public Library. We are a small library in a small town, but we’ve agreed that one of the important things that we need to do is to promote our library on Social Media. Of course, there is no extra money to hire additional staff to perform this responsibility. And so, one of the tasks I’ve taken on, is handling the library’s social media campaigns. It has been a good experience, partnering with our Library Manager to promote our library through various social media channels*.

This summer I worked on 3 different campaigns promoting the library. While I’m rediscovering the wheel here; I think the wheel is the same shape regardless of the size of your audience/campaign. So, here are 5 things I’ve learned about using social media effectively.

#1 Organization is Key

If you’re not prepared to be organized about your social media you might as well not start any kind of social media campaign. The problem – many people (including myself at the start of this project) think of social media in terms of hanging out on Facebook and Twitter and playing on Pinterest. They don’t think of it as real work. If you’re going to do it right – it is real work and you need to get organized to do it. After running three social media campaigns for our library, I’m building a workflow† and the tools‡to support that workflow. I also think about the workload differently now. Various campaigns may represent peak effort, but in order to keep the connection with our audience alive (see #3), we need to plan to stay active all the time.

#2 Know Your Audience

It seems so simple, of course you’ve got to know your audience. But really, who are you talking to? To get the best results for your effort on social media, be prepared to re-evaluate who your audience is. For example; initially on Twitter our follows were of other libraries and and book oriented accounts. But the longer this social media project goes on, the more our definition of our audience and our purpose for talking to them evolves. Currently, we see all social media channels as methods for connecting with our patrons. And by demonstrating our strong connections with our patrons, we are also using social media to influence our funding agencies.

#3 Silence is Golden – Except When it Isn’t

Don’t wait for your announcement/programs/promotion before you start to speak to your audience. The social media space is a busy place and people aren’t going to hang around watching to see if you’re about to say something.

Instead

#4 Give First

Bring value to the conversation with information that is useful and/or interesting to your conversation partners. This is good manners and good conversation in real life, and it works online too. Good value can be kitten pictures or local information. Targeting your audience will help you decide what information serves them best. I won’t say the worst thing you can do is post random stuff, but random does make you appear less focused. It makes it harder for your desired audience to understand what you can do for them. Take advantage of the analytics provided by the various social media channels. What posts are liked and shared? What tweets are viewed most often?

#5 Make Connections

Make connections with complementary organizations. Linking to partners also helps with the ever present problem (demand) for more content. It wasn’t until I started including information from the Town of Redcliff’s Programs and Events calendar; that I felt like our information stream started to achieve a natural flow. That is; we’re publishing lots of useful posts/tweets, without always harping on our particular program reminders and solicitations. Instead, “our stuff” is placed in an attractive context of useful information. Connections have helped with content and those connections extend our reach by sharing and reposting our content.

Have I figured everything out yet? Of course not, social media is a work in progress and so is how we use it.

Footnotes

* What do I mean by Social Media Channels. For now, for us, it is Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest.†By workflow, I mean creating a series of steps that will take an idea and create a series of posts, tweets etc to promote it. Very little of this is automated. My goal is to create a workflow that any volunteer could follow.‡My tools include at this point: an Excel spreadsheet, an IFTTT account, Google Calendar, and a bit of Hootsuite. This article from Hootsuite started me thinking about how I wanted to design my own spreadsheet.